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Monday, 16 June 2014

Back in April of this year, the Greater Manchester Local Records Centre organised a Wildlife Recorders' Conference at Manchester Museum. I was asked to give a speech and you can read it below (well it took me long enough to write it!):

"I want to start by introducing you to a great Mancunian – a
person who some of you may, possibly, have never heard of.

His name was James Crowther and he was born in 1768, in the
cellar of a slum property near Deansgate. Most of his working life was spent as
a porter on the canal at Knott Mill. His life seems to have been an
extraordinary mixture of hardship and joy. He was an exuberant free spirit and
his great passion in life was botany. It was said of him that: “[H]e was
characterised by a cheerful, joyous disposition; was the life and soul of any
botanical party, and pursued both botany and entomology with the greatest
ardour.” He thought nothing of walking 15 or 20 miles, after work, in search of
plants. He always received a week’s holiday at Whitsun and used to walk to the
Yorkshire Dales. On one of these trips he discovered the Lady’s Slipper orchid.

Another of his finds was the Mudwort – which he found
growing on the (appropriately enough) mud by the side of a mere near Knutsford.
He told his friend Edward Hobson about this find and Hobson insisted that James
take him to see it. In the interim it rained heavily and when they reached the
mere the Mudwort was under water. Hobson went off to look for something else but
when he came back there was no sign of James. Suddenly the surface of the mere
erupted and up came James triumphantly clutching a specimen of the Mudwort!

Another lake which featured in James’s life was the one in
Tatton Park. One day he arrived in the park with a home-made contraption – a
long wooden pole with brass fittings. He was almost immediately grabbed by two
gamekeepers who accused him of poaching fish and dragged him before the owner
of the park, Mr Egerton. James explained to Egerton that the contraption was
for retrieving water weeds – not fish. Such were his powers of persuasion, and
so impressed was Egerton by his knowledge and enthusiasm, that he told his
keepers that James was not be molested again and was allowed to enter the park
any time he chose.

Gamekeepers were an occupational hazard for James and they
invariably accused him of poaching. Once he was chased across 3 or 4 miles of
open country and only just managed to escape. On another occasion he, and his
friend Richard Buxton, were searching for Cloudberries on the moors above
Stalybridge; they strayed onto a grouse moor and were apprehended by an irate
gamekeeper who refused to believe that they weren’t poachers. They knew that
the rich guarded their land zealously and that the penalties for poaching were
severe. On this occasion they finally managed to talk themselves out of a
dangerous situation.

James had many friends who shared his enthusiasm for plants
and natural history. Two of these friends were John Bland Wood, a medical doctor
from Salford and the aforementioned Richard Buxton, who was a poor shoe-maker
from Ancoats. Both of these men published floras of the Manchester region and
James contributed records to both publications.
Both of these books give us a tantalising glimpse of this part of the
country before industrialisation and urbanisation wiped out many of its natural
riches.

The confrontations that James and his friends had with
gamekeepers reminds us that, from the middle of the 18th century to
the middle of the 19th century, the rich and the nobility contrived
to have acts of Parliament passed which allowed them to enclose lands which had
formerly been held in common. These enclosures too often had a devastating
effect on wildlife and natural habitats. We don’t know what James and Richard
and their associates thought about this, but one of their contemporaries did
make his views known. This was John Clare, a farm labourer and poet from the
village of Helpston - which lies to the north of my home town of Peterborough. John
kept a nature diary for a few years and his poetry reveals an intimate and
detailed knowledge of his local wildlife – particularly of birds. One of his
greatest poems, entitled ‘Remembrances’, describes the catastrophic effect that
the Enclosure Movement had upon his beloved local countryside:

Inclosure like a
Buonaparte let not a thing remain

It levelled every bush and tree and levelled
every hill

And hung the moles for
traitors – though the brook is running still

It runs a naked stream
cold and chill.

And since Clare’s day, losses of wildlife have
accelerated, especially since the Second World War when so-called ‘agricultural
improvement’, and latterly rampant development, have become the norm. Recently,
a wide-ranging alliance of wildlife conservation groups published a report
entitled ‘The State of Nature’ - a comprehensive audit of what has happened to
the natural world in Britain over the last half century. The report was
co-ordinated and produced by the RSPB but 24 other bodies took part, ranging
from the Bat Conservation Trust to the British Lichen Society.

The report is, essentially, a catalogue of loss. It examines
the fates of 3,148 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians,
invertebrates and plants in the British countryside since 1962. It concludes
that 60% of these species have declined in numbers, 30% have declined by more
than half and 10% are threatened with extinction. Populations of many species –
like the House Sparrow or the Garden Tiger Moth - which were common only a couple
of decades ago are now in steep decline. I note, in passing, that such a report
would not have been possible without the work of thousands of wildlife
recorders, working over decades, to accumulate the necessary records.

But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by these grim
statistics. It’s sad to relate that our species has been wiping out other
species for a very long time. It is now, more or less, agreed that when humans
migrated out of Africa, between 100 and 200 thousand years ago, they
exterminated large animals (mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths etc.) on
five continents. A paleobiologist, named John Alroy, told the American
journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert that this ‘megafauna extinction’ was a
“geologically instantaneous ecological catastrophe too gradual to be perceived
by the people who unleashed it.” But the rate of destruction appears to be
exponential and we’re now on the part of the curve where it starts climbing
close to vertical; the on-going catastrophe is now perceivable well within a single
human life-time. There have been five major extinction events in the history of
Planet Earth and we’re now living through the sixth. And there’s no doubt that
our own species is causing this one.

But there’s something very odd about this sixth extinction. Others
were caused by insensible natural forces – climate change, volcanism, asteroids
etc. but what makes this one unique is that it is being studied, in meticulous
detail, by elements of the causal agent! I wonder if there’s any evolutionary
significance to that fact – I don’t know – ask me again in another 100,000
years!

But there’s more to recording than just cataloguing loss.
Sadly, we live in a culture which is currently so uncivilised that it doesn’t
recognise, as James and his friends did, and modern people like you and I still
do, the value of the natural world for its own sake. We have to justify the
conservation of landscapes and habitats by proving that they are notably
biodiverse and worth conserving; and that means record keeping.

Everyone in this room understands where James’s mad
enthusiasm came from and why he derived so much joy from the natural world. A
world sterilised of its wildlife, and containing only humans and their
artifacts, would not be worth living in – and would probably not even be
survivable. And that’s why we have to stand against the rising tide of
destruction. Record keeping may seem a rather mundane and bureaucratic activity
– but it’s a powerful weapon in our armoury.

Dave Bishop, April 2014

References:

1. ‘The Late James Crowther, The Naturalist’: Obituary in the
Manchester Guardian, Jan 13, 1847 (Thanks to Andrew Simpson for directing me to
this remarkable document).

2. ‘The Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare’: edited by Eric
Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield, Oxford University Press, 1967.

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The Friends of Chorlton Meadows cover Chorlton Ees, Ivy Green and Hardy Farm community orchard. The group is interested in taking a practical approach to working with the Mersey Valley Countryside Warden Service to manage the sites for the conservation of flora and fauna; and have an active programme of events through the year.